09 October, 2008

I see no one (well, hardly anyone) in the Obama camp calling for anywhere near the sort of violence to be visited on Bush, Cheney or McCain and Palin.

There is a certain small minority calling for an organized campaign to place Karl Rove, John Yoo, David Addington, Roberto Gonzalez, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and were they not under the protection of the Secret Service (SS anyone? no, too far?), Bush and Cheney under citizen's arrest for their war crimes.

I am among that minority.

..and if I were for the death penalty, which I certainly oppose, I would say that for some of them "hangin' is too good".

But I am a radical who believes in crazy things like if you are responsible for the unjust deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians you are a war criminal. That if you eavesdrop on millions of innocent people without a legal court order, you are a criminal. That if you peddle influence and deal in cronyism, you certainly have no place in a supposed democratic form of government but instead should oversee some banana republic.

At best, George W Bush is a two-bit, self-aggrandizing hack; a character much like Forest Whittaker's King Idi Amin, minus the actual fortitude to personally dispatch his enemies (Bush hides behind a military he himself "served" only by the loosest interpretation of the word). At worst, Bush has on his hands a body count that rivals the worst monsters of the 20th Century, all for the grave and criminal folly of his Daddy-complex driven campaign to leave his mark (stain) on history.

In that sense, Bush is more blood thirsty, more psychotic and more dangerous an animal than Amin was. As examples of human beings, I think both are fairly deplorable.

What I find alarming, getting back to McCain, is that we have (thankfully, according to www.fivethirtyeight.com, less than a 1 out of 10 chance) the ability within our sights to elect another maniac with a paternal inferiority complex whose campaign is, as Greenwald pointed out, increasingly characterized by inciting to riot as stump speech.

Does America have Daddy issues? Senator Obama's wasn't there for him, but it didn't turn him into a sociopath. Wherein lies the cause of this American National Sociopathy (forgive the pun, Godwin)? Because that is what American exceptionalism is in a nutshell: sociopathy on a national scale.